Jack Bates wrote:
Petri Helenius wrote:
Isn´t "highlight and hit delete" exactly what has been implemented since Mozilla 1.3 and works with almost perfect accuracy after you give it a few dozen messages to build up the "good and bad" database with?
Actually, I find that 1.3 and 1.4 still have issues with determining spam. While fairly decent, one still has to go through looking for false positives. The other issue is that spammers have been doing a good job at designing emails to fool filters. I'm starting to see more and more spam designed to defeat Baynesian filters. By including "good" words in their emails, they either make good words spammy so that you get more FP's or they make their email clean enough that it's still in your inbox. The worst part of it is that spam is quickly becoming unreadable, so that legitimate emails that are readable are the emails more likely filtered.
I have not found this to be the case. While I don't manage an abuse mailbox, I do manage a busy mailing list. The mailing list address and administrative addresses have been picked up by spammers and are probably now on all those "millions of email addresses" CDs. The mailing list address and administrative addresses are also both regularly forged (used to send spam) so I get all the undeliverable spams mixed in with all the undeliverable actual list email. Until I started using the Bayesian filters in Mozilla, weeding thru the spam to find the actual administrative emails that needed my attention was a very big chore, and my false positive rate utilizing JHD was fairly high. Now Mozilla filters for me, and has a much lower false positive rate. Note, I fed Mozilla's Bayesian filters two folders, each containing over 1000 emails, one full of spam and one full of legitimate administrative email, to train it to learn what was and wasn't acceptable email. Hand sorting until I had these two seed folders took a fair bit of time, but it was clearly worth it! The Bayesian filters are the main reason I'm using Mozilla. Eudora does some things much better than Mozilla, but I can't live without the spam filters anymore! jc